Did you know that teaching is one of the easiest professions to find a job overseas?

In May 2012, The Harvard Business Review declared that English was the official language of business. Nearly 1 in every 4 people speak English at a converational level (1.75 billion people!). HBR lists three reasons why English has become so fundamental: 1. If you want to buy and sell, you must be able to communicate in diverse settings; 2. Language differences create a bottleneck in working together; and 3. Merger and acquisitions are less complicated and…

One common way people get a job overseas is by teaching English. For most of you reading this blog, you already have a necessary skill to do this-you speak English! However, you probably have a lot of questions about the practical steps to actually making this dream job a reality. We've complied this short list of resources that will help you understand the next steps you can take to teaching English overseas.

Maggie Fox got a surprise when she handed her Muslim coworker a Bible — the woman told her she had always wanted to read one. So did her husband! It was a divine encounter that confirmed Fox’s calling: Combining her love of teaching with a passion to take the gospel to hard places.

Fox, whose name has been changed to protect her security, taught for several months at a school in a country closed to traditional missionaries. Now she’s going back indefinitely to continue living missionally while she teaches at that same elementary school. And she’s urging other professionals to join…

This week we’ve given you some great examples of how normal people have used their teaching skills to get real jobs and opportunities overseas. Stories like this are helpful and encouraging, but if you’re anything like my husband, you’re thinking, “Just tell me how to do this!” So let’s dive in and get down to the nitty gritty details of landing a teaching job overseas.

Get your license!

First and for-most, you MUST have an actual teaching license from your state. Many people think that they can teach abroad simply because they speak English. Now…

I had been married for less than 5 months when my Foreign Language method's instructor announced that she had a scholarship available for anyone who was willing to student teach in Spain, in Spanish. I'm sure most newly married women aren't ready to leave their husbands for 2 months to teach in a foreign country (nor do most newly married men!) but I was not a typical newly married woman! My husband was really supportive of this opportunity so after we'd been married for a mere 8 months, I hopped on a plain by myself, headed for Spain. As a high school student, I had dreamed of studying…

This is part 2 of a series on teaching overseas in Italy. Read part 1 here.

In my last post I talked about being a teacher in a “locked ivory tower.” If you are like me, hearing about such brokenness typically conjures up tears as well as hypothetical images of myself in that environment caring for those students with fairy dust and happiness all around as if it were a Meryl Streep teachers movie. Well, the day-to-day reality is far from that. Like in any…

I remember well the time that I sat down with Mark and Kendra* in a hotel lobby as they told me the unbelievable story of how they ended up with teaching jobs in the Middle East. They were seasoned teachers with growing children. So what had happened in their lives that they were now picking up their careers and moving to a large city in the Middle East, to teach? You see, when a person fully grasps that their life is not meant to be hoarded, but rather given for the cause of advancing the Gospel around the world, things change. Mark and Kendra totally grasped this. They were not deterred…